Headlights For Your Grill: LED Lights Brighten Japanese Smiles

Gold and diamond dental “grills” not flashy enough for you? Not to worry, LED smiles inspired by a Japanese retail ad campaign will give your mouth a glow even Flavor Flav can't beat.

Sorry Flav, your golden grill is way cool and all but outside after dark, no one knows or cares. Not so with LED smiles, battery operated “fronts” that can be affixed to your teeth allowing you to flash the blinding smile you always wish you had – day or night. Especially night, as this gaggle of Japanese schoolgirls demonstrates on Harajuku streets:

The LED-lit oral accessory is the brainstorm of Motoi Ishibashi and Daito Manabe, a couple of Japanese designers whose original experiment morphed into a striking ad campaign mounted by trendy retailer Laforet Harajuku.

According to a report on the tiny, mouth-worn devices by the New York Times, Tokyo fashionistas are demanding LED smiles of their very own.

Users of the garish glowing grills can adjust the color of the lighting through a computer interface, though it's not known whether such fine-tuning must be conducted before wearing or on the fly via an attached smartphone.

As LED smiles aren't yet available in retail stores, Ishibashi and Manabe are conducting workshops that instruct attendees how to construct their own “fronts” from cheap, off-the-shelf components. Attendance figures have not been released.

For those whose grins aren't exactly rays of sunshine, LED smiles could be the answer... to a question nobody asked. Then again, you can't argue with Flavor Flav's success. (via TokyoMango and The New York Times)

This is the weirdest thing I ever saw, sure I want a glowing smile but I never pictured this in my head. I guess I still prefer the invisalign Tucson option but it's good to know we can get some extra shine if we want to.